In Cold Pursuit vw-1 Page 4

  “Thanks.”

  He smiled and went back to work at his own machine.

  Out of the corner of one eye, Valena studied the soft curve of his nose, the curly fringe of his mustache, his closely cropped hair shot with early gray. Almost palpable kindness radiated from him. Again, and a little more loudly this time, she said, “Thank you.”

  He glanced back her way and gave her a wink. “You’re welcome.” He continued working.

  “I really appreciate that.”

  He took his hands off his keyboard and folded them across his chest. Tipped his head her way. Regarded her with a gentle smile. “First time on the ice?”

  “Yes.”

  “Me, too. I’ve been here about a month. I was minding my own business one day and a colleague said, ‘They’ve got jobs in Antarctica. Want to go?’ and I said, ‘Sure, where do I sign up?’ How about you?”

  “I have always, always wanted to come here,” she replied. “Or at least, ever since I was a kid and my granddad read to me about Shackleton’s winter in the ice and all that. I wanted to come here and know what he loved so much about it that he would take such a risk. And… I hoped that I would love it that much, too.” Now she felt embarrassed. She hadn’t told anyone any of this, ever. Why was she blurting it out now, and to a total stranger?

  The man held out his right hand to be shaken. “Michael.”

  “Valena,” she replied. “Nice to meet you, Michael.”

  “Been to Happy Camp yet?”

  “The survival training? No. I start tomorrow.”

  “Really? Excellent! We’ll be there together.” He got up and crossed to the coffeemaker, poured some for each of them, handed one to Valena, and sat back down in his chair. “Excuse me, please. I’ve got to finish this and then get over to the chapel in time for tai chi.” He focused his eyes on his computer screen, lined his fingers up over the keyboard, and dove back into his work.

  She turned to her computer and tapped into the Internet, bringing up her e-mail account.

  She wrote to Taha Hesan, the other graduate student who was supposed to be coming to the ice to serve on Vanderzee’s project. He was a doctoral candidate. She had gotten to know him only slightly as they prepared for the trip.

  Taha

  I am here in McM and V is not. NSF says that they got hold of you and told you not to come. I don’t know how much they told you about why, but here’s what I’ve got:

  1. V was removed from the ice under guard.

  2. It’s got to do with the reporter who died in his camp last year.

  3. Presuming the worst, V is being charged with

  She paused a moment. It didn’t make any sense to be writing this. A renewed sense of shock gripped her. Her fingers felt cold on the keyboard. Shaking herself free, she deleted “with” and simply put a period to mark the end of the sentence. Then she added:

  Please write ASAP to let me know your plans. My plan is to proceed as if V is returning soon. Do you have any idea what needs to be done to prepare for fieldwork? I have Snowcraft I (Happy Camp) tomorrow and Tuesday—your Sunday and Monday; I keep forgetting that I’ve crossed the international date line into tomorrow—so I will be incommunicado for two days. Anything you can do from your end to help V and supply info that will keep our project going I would appreciate.

  Valena

  She hit send and then sat with her fingers suspended half an inch above the keys. Who can I go to for help? she wondered. Who would know where to start with a mess like this?

  Suddenly the answer came to her. She would write to Emily Hansen, a woman she had gotten to know during her undergraduate studies at the University of Utah. Em had been doing her master’s there at the time, and she now worked for the Utah Geological Survey. Her specialty was forensic geology, and she was famous for the work she had done unraveling crimes. Yes, that was it, write to Em; she could tell her how to proceed, and she could keep her mouth shut, so it would be okay to tell her everything!

  Valena looked up the Utah Geological Survey Web site to find an e-mail address for Em, then tapped out a message stating what had happened, ending with:

  I’m trying to figure out how to proceed. How do I get people around here to tell me things? And does Antarctica fall under some kind of international tribunal or do American scientists accused of endangering American journalists fall under American jurisprudence?

  Remembering her manners, Valena asked after what was new in Em’s life, signed herself, “Affectionately, Valena,” thought better of it, given the gravity of the situation, and changed “affectionately” to “yours” and then hit send.

  She glanced over at Michael. His face was calm and tightly focused on something he was reading. She thought of offering to freshen up his coffee but didn’t want to seem too earnest about getting to know him. She had heard that the ratio of men to women in McMurdo was seven to three, so it might be unwise to seem too friendly.

  Turning back toward her Internet account, she wrote an e-mail to send to her list of interested friends and family, extolling the beauty of the view out the window and trying to put in words just how big it was and how tiny this frail outpost of humanity seemed by contrast. In thus doing, she at last plunged herself into an enjoyment of having made it to Antarctica. Time flowed and the clock crept past 10:00 a.m. and approached 11:00. Valena’s stomach growled, breaking her concentration, and she decided to get some food.

  She found her way downstairs and out through the heavy doors of the airlock, out across the yard past a row of tracked vehicles, up over the stile, and back toward Building 155. The icy wind was blowing toward her, and she could smell cooking fumes coming from the exhaust system. A short, stubby tracked vehicle ground past the upwind end of the building, and a few seconds later, she smelled gasoline. Just as quickly as it had reached her, the odor dissipated and was gone.

  Both odors were oddly overpowering. Why? she wondered. Then she noticed that there were no other odors around her, no stink of rotting compost, no soft scent of flowers. Rocks and snow have no smell, she realized.

  Valena continued into the building, then turned into the dorm hallway to her left, so that she could leave her parka in her room. Deciding to look her very best, she doffed the turtleneck and slipped into a creamy white fleece pullover that clung to her curves. She then continued down the main corridor toward the scents of food and people. The air smelled of sweetness and grains—waffles?

  Following the flow of people swarming in for the meal, she arrived at a TV monitor that was scrolling information about movies, flight schedules, and the weather. It was a robust fourteen degrees Fahrenheit outside, negative ten degrees Celsius. She checked the flight schedules and saw that her name was not on any of the manifests. This was the first bit of truly good news she had had since arriving.

  Next she headed for the hand-washing station, DON’T SPREAD THE CRUD, a sign on the wall above the sink advised. Following the instructions listed, she used plenty of soap and scrubbed assiduously for fifteen seconds, pondering how little Emmett Vanderzee had told her about survival in this harsh and bizarre environment. She tried to give her absent-minded mentor the benefit of the doubt, but his lack of advisement bothered her. Had he not, in fact, been the leader she had thought he was?

  And if he was not that kind of leader, just what was he? A murderer? The thought was absurd. But was he a bungler? Had she bet on the wrong horse?

  She grabbed a sheet of paper toweling and began to dry her hands. People filed past her on their way to brunch. Most made eye contact, smiled, and nodded; some said hello. What had Brenda said? In a place like this, you can’t really hide anything. That meant that Valena was about to meet several hundred people who might have ideas about where to look for things that were supposed to lie hidden.

  Valena turned toward the dining hall. It was time to get acquainted with more good citizens of McMurdo Station.

  3

  DAVE FITZGERALD CRUISED THROUGH THE FOOD LINES in the galley in search of
something hot and filling. It had been a long, cold week rolling snow into ice out at Pegasus runway, and he needed to stock up for another.

  Building this landing surface at Pegasus was a satisfying challenge. It was built in layers, using the only road metal they had in Antarctica: snow. He and the other heavy equipment operators out of Fleet Operations used a 966 Cat loader with a snow-throwing attachment to coat the runway, then drove a Challenger 95 tractor up and down the runway pulling a Reynolds box, laying the snow out in a smooth three-inch layer. Next, they transformed the three inches of snow into an ultra-hard-packed, one-and-a-half-inch-thick surface of white ice by dragging 124 tons of weight carts behind the Challenger. The weight of the rollers caused a process that metallurgists called sintering, in which the structure of the fine ice crystals they called snow were compressed and reformed into a dense, interlocking crystal lattice hard and smooth enough to land jets. Each layer took about three days of working around the clock, and it would take ten layers to get the desired effect.

  Building runways and dressing the flagged routes that led out to them was slow, exacting, and satisfying, his favorite kind of work, and the solitude of the long hours in the tractor in all that gloriously empty space was eased by a weather-tight cab and the Armed Forces radio station that piped in classic rock. But riding back and forth in the cold for nine hours a day, six days each week, built up an appetite. It looked like the Belgian waffles were the cure today, and hey, how about some eggs and bacon and a little dessert? He moved over to the sweets table. What was this little confection that the kind pixies from the kitchen had left for him? Looked like lemon bars. And oh, that fresh-baked bread, mm-hm!

  Dave forked two of the lemon bars straight onto his tray and picked out a nice, thick slice of bread to chew on while he waited in line for a waffle. He snagged a little bowl of stewed fruit just in case all those folks who touted diet pyramids knew what they were squawking about, loaded up two glasses with milk, grabbed a fork and a knife, and turned toward the waffle line. Having slept in after an evening sipping Jim Beam and Cokes at Gallagher’s, he was hungry as a bear.

  “Hey there, Dave,” said the chef as he reached the front of the line. “Fix ya up with a waffle here?”

  “You know you can,” Dave replied. “Hey, you were doing purty well at the pool table last night at Gallagher’s.”

  The chef winked. “Gotta shark me some extra dollars. When I get out of here I’m going to travel up through south-east Asia. Ride an elephant, all that.”

  “Sounds great.” Dave gave him a friendly smile. The folks who worked in the galley were really decent. They took the job of feeding the horde of people who flowed through McMurdo very seriously and greeted each soul who stood in their lines with dignity and professional pride. He especially liked the omelet guy. He was older than the rest and had learned exactly how Dave liked his eggs, but waffles were only an option on Sundays.

  “Here ya go, man. Check out the strawberries. They’re fresh!”

  “They look wonderful,” said Dave, scooping several spoonfuls onto his waffle.

  “Go for it. We got a whole load of freshies in from Cheech yesterday with that late flight. Cool, huh? Yeah, loads of lettuce, too; they’ll be up for dinner. Man, I’m salivating just thinking of it.”

  “Me, too. I never was a fresh foods man before coming down here, but now I’d walk a mile in tight shoes for an orange or a banana. Hey, is it true that you sometimes get spiders and such on the lettuce?”

  Waffle Guy grinned. “Yeah.”

  “What do you do with them? Put them in the compost?”

  “Oh, hell no! We keep them as pets!”

  His waffle acquired and heaped with strawberries and whipped cream, Dave turned toward the galley to choose a seat. He craned his neck to see if Ben, the biologist he had enjoyed visiting with the morning before, was sitting up in the beaker zone. No luck. He spotted his roommate Matt at one of the tables where the heavy equipment operators tended to sit and headed over to join him.

  Matt had his turquoise blue contact lenses on, which always had a startling effect. He drove various loaders and a mammoth forklift built by Caterpillar. It could lift enormously heavy loads, like the big metal shipping containers that brought materials in from the States and carried waste materials back. It had a big counterweighting butt emblazoned with a cartoon of Garfield and its nickname: Fat Cat. “Morning, Dave,” Matt said, without glancing up.

  “Matt.” Dave settled down and shoveled into his eggs. For several minutes the only noises from their table were the soft sounds of munching and forks hitting china.

  “Yup.”

  “So, you goin’ to Black Island this week?”

  “Hope so.”

  “You gonna drive the Challenger, Flipper, or one of the snow machines?”

  “Dunno.”

  “Whatcha haulin’ out there?”

  “Water.”

  “You and me, we’re like an old married couple,” Matt said finally, as he pushed aside his plate and moved his coffee closer to his large chest. “That was four one-word sentences out of five, and a total of only two words over one syllable.”

  “You ought to go back to teaching, Matt.”

  Matt laughed. “But I hate kids, remember? That’s why I came here. You see anyone under eighteen in this room?”

  Dave looked about him. “I’m not sure as I see anyone under thirty.”

  “Over there by the milk machine. The DA who’s putting in the new box of nonfat.”

  “What’s ‘DA’ stand for, anyway?”

  “Dining assistant.”

  “Oh. Thought maybe the D stood for dog. They work purty hard for their wages, and they sure are the bottom of the totem pole around here. They never go anywheres. Imagine coming all the way down here and never seeing the outdoors, even, except one day a week, and you’d get a different day off than everyone else, too.”

  “You’re changing the subject. What do you think of her?”

  “Aw, hell, Matt.”

  “You like her?”

  “She’s cute.”

  “I know her. I could introduce you.”

  Dave blushed slightly, a change in coloration that only really showed around his eyes, where the glacier goggles protected the skin from tanning. “A bit young for me, Matt.”

  “What, you looking for long-term commitment and deep meaning? You’ve been here, what? Eight weeks? And you haven’t hit on a single female. C’mon, folks will think you’re gay.”

  Dave grinned. “Think we’re gay, you mean.”

  “No, really, man, you gotta start checking out the chicks.”

  Dave looked around. “Half of them are gay,” he said, now trying humor to throw Matt off his case.

  “Why, because they aren’t climbing into your lap?”

  “You gotta admit some of the women here are tougher than both of us put together.”

  Three more men walked up to their table, arranged their trays, and sat down. Dave idly took a census of their gastronomic decisions. Steve, a Fleet Ops comrade who had stood his share of shifts out at Pegasus, weighed in with a nice-looking cheese and black olive omelet, while Wilbur, who ran a loader on the road being constructed up past the layout yard, had decided on a big bowl of the homemade granola heaped with Greek yogurt, nuts, and stewed fruit. Joe, who was helping construct the floating ice dock that would service the supply ships, had gone for the waffles. As they forked their first mouthfuls of food and swilled their first ounces of juice, coffee, and water, Dave took a big draw on one of his glasses of milk, wondering what kind of nonsense the gang of three was going to come up with this time.

  Steve delivered the first volley. “Any new babes to check out? I hear where yesterday’s C-17 made it in from Cheech, so it’s possible.” He glanced around the room, scanning the tables.

  Matt said, “Chasing skirt’s bound to be one big exercise in frustration in a place where the ratio of bucks to does is seven to three.”

  Joe
said, “What are you, gay?”

  “It’s the thrill of the hunt. Oh, Wilbur, there’s your honey now,” said Steve, eyeing a young computer tech who was just emerging from the waffle line. “What’s her name?”

  “Burnie.”

  “Short for Burnadette?”

  Wilbur shook his head. “Nope, short for burns my ass. She just storms through the dining room like she’s some grade school principal in pursuit of a kid accused of shitting in someone’s lunchbox.”

  “Nice tits,” said Joe.

  Wilbur shot him a look.

  “I don’t mean yours,” said Joe. “Hers! You gotta admit, she’s got tits made in heaven, and when she rolls her ass like that—”

  “Stop it!” said Wilbur. “She ain’t giving me any, so I can’t stand to watch, so I ain’t, and I sure’s hell wish you’d quit giving me the blow by blow.”

  “What is it you guys named her?” Dave asked. “You have such a way with language.”

  “We call her Hell No,” said Steve. “Guess why.”

  Wilbur said, “‘Cause that’s her answer. The tight-assed—”

  Dave said, “I gotta wonder if you boys might do better if you went it alone, rather than hunting as a pack.”

  “Dang!” said Wilbur. “Here comes Wiggles!”

  Joe swung his face around to catch every last ripple of movement. “My, my, my. I do like what she’s done with all those chocolate bars she’s been eating.”

  Steve snickered appreciatively. “Cadbury’s ought to hire her. She’d be an inspiration to all young women who think anorexia is a beauty plan.”

  Steve asked, “What’s the deal with the load from Cheech?”

  “Only one female name on the flight manifest,” said Wilbur. “At least, I think Valena is a woman’s name.”

  “What’s her other name?”

  “I forget.”

  “Walker,” said Joe. “Valena Walker.”

  Matt said, “Yankee last name, first name ending in A, sounds like a babe to me. But they’re mostly bringing in beakers these days, so she could be one of those brainy ones with less hair than you have.”